Produced by Mary Glenn Krause, amsibert, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE FOX THAT WANTED NINE GOLDEN TAILS [Illustration: “The most beautiful girl he had ever seen stood before him.”] The Fox That Wanted Nine Golden Tails BY Kathleen Gray Nelson [Illustration] THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY All rights reserved THE FOX THAT WANTED NINE GOLDEN TAILS CHAPTER I He was a Japanese fox, and although he looked just like any other fox, he knew a few things that his American brothers have never heard about even to this day. One of these things was that if he lived to be one hundred years old without ever being chased by a dog, he could become a beautiful woman; if he lived for five hundred years and never a dog pursued him, he could be changed into a mighty wizard who would know more than any man on earth; but, better than all, after a thousand years of peace he would turn into a celestial fox and have nine golden tails. Now a beautiful woman does very well in her place and it is a great honor to be a wise man, but a fox with nine golden tails is the most wonderful thing in all the world. For that reason when the fox was very young, only about sixty or seventy-five, he thought he would refuse to be changed into either a woman or a wizard and would wait for his thousandth birthday. “There are enough pretty women and wise men in the world now,” he explained to his friends of the forest. “The pretty women make the trouble and the wise men try to straighten it out, and they are both kept busy. They don’t have half as much fun as a fox.” But as the years went by he grew so tired of skulking and hiding about, and being nothing but a common, every-day, bushy-tailed gray fox that he almost decided to compromise the matter. “After all, there are worse things in the world than pretty women,” he said, scratching his ear, “and wise men have their uses.” What settled the question quite suddenly was a most exciting adventure he had just when he had begun to think he was cunning enough to outwit all the dogs on the Island of Japan. Now, he had had a great deal of experience in this line, and it was no wonder he flattered himself his dodging tactics were perfect. His ear was so trained he could hear a dog barking miles away, and he could smell a pack of hounds even further than he could hear them. Besides, when he looked at their tracks he knew exactly how long it had been since they passed that way, and as he had many acquaintances among the birds and bees and butterflies, they, too, often gave him timely warning.